(29 January 1810 – 14 May 1893)
See as well some earlier references to diamond signs here .
The proper context for some diamond figures that I am interested in
is the 4×4 array that appears, notably, in Hudson's 1905 classic
Kummer's Quartic Surface . Hence this post's "Kummerhenge" tag,
suggested also by some monumental stonework at Tufte's site.
http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~idolga/KummerOliver.pdf
is a preprint of an Oct. 10, 2019, talk by Igor Dolgachev —
Kummer Surfaces: 200 Years of Study.
The preprint is also available on the arXiv:
The Hudson array mentioned above is as follows —
See also Whitehead and the
Relativity Problem (Sept. 22).
For coordinatization of a 4×4
array, see a note from 1986
in the Feb. 26 post Citation.
(Continued.)
The previous post suggests a review of
the following mathematical landmark —
The cited article by Kummer is at . . .
https://archive.org/details/monatsberichtede1864kn/page/246 .
From the series of posts tagged Kummerhenge —
A Wikipedia article relating the above 4×4 square to the work of Kummer —
A somewhat more interesting aspect of the geometry of the 4×4 square
is its relationship to the 4×6 grid underlying the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) of R. T. Curtis. Hudson's 1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface
deals with the Kummer properties above and also foreshadows, without
explicitly describing, the finite-geometry properties of the 4×4 square as
a finite affine 4-space — properties that are of use in studying the Mathieu
group M24 with the aid of the MOG.
Those pleased by what Ross Douthat today called
"The Return of Paganism" are free to devise rituals
involving what might be called "the sacred geometry
of the Kummer 166 configuration."
As noted previously in this journal,
"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."
— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets
See also earlier posts also tagged "Kummerhenge" and
another property of the remarkable Kummer 166 —
For some related literary remarks, see "Transposed" in this journal.
Some background from 2001 —
For further details, see finitegeometry.org/sc/35/hudson.html.
“… the utterly real thing in writing is the only thing that counts…."
— Maxwell Perkins to Ernest Hemingway, Aug. 30, 1935
"Omega is as real as we need it to be."
— Burt Lancaster in "The Osterman Weekend"
"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."
— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets
See too "The Ruler of Reality" in this journal.
Related material —
A more esoteric artifact: The Kummer 166 Configuration . . .
An array of Göpel tetrads appears in the background below.
"As you can see, we've had our eye on you
for some time now, Mr. Anderson."
The previous post quoted Tom Wolfe on Chomsky's use of
the word "array."
An example of particular interest is the 4×4 array
(whether of dots or of unit squares) —
.
Some context for the 4×4 array —
The following definition indicates that the 4×4 array, when
suitably coordinatized, underlies the Kummer lattice .
Further background on the Kummer lattice:
Alice Garbagnati and Alessandra Sarti,
"Kummer Surfaces and K3 surfaces
with $(Z/2Z)^4$ symplectic action."
To appear in Rocky Mountain J. Math. —
The above article is written from the viewpoint of traditional
algebraic geometry. For a less traditional view of the underlying
affine 4-space from finite geometry, see the website
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
Some further context …
"To our knowledge, the relation of the Golay code
to the Kummer lattice … is a new observation."
— Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland,
"The overarching finite symmetry group of
Kummer surfaces in the Mathieu group M24 "
As noted earlier, Taormina and Wendland seem not to be aware of
R. W. H. T. Hudson's use of the (uncoordinatized*) 4×4 array in his
1905 book Kummer's Quartic Surface. The array was coordinatized,
i.e. given a "vector space structure," by Cullinane eight years prior to
the cited remarks of Curtis.
* Update of Sept. 14: "Uncoordinatized," but parametrized by 0 and
the 15 two-subsets of a six-set. See the post of Sept. 13.
From "Projective Geometry and PT-Symmetric Dirac Hamiltonian,"
Y. Jack Ng and H. van Dam,
Physics Letters B , Volume 673, Issue 3,
23 March 2009, Pages 237–239
(http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2579v2, last revised Feb. 20, 2009)
" Studies of spin-½ theories in the framework of projective geometry
have been undertaken before. See, e.g., Ref. [4]. 1 "
" 1 These papers are rather mathematical and technical.
The authors of the first two papers discuss the Dirac equation
in terms of the Plucker-Klein correspondence between lines of
a three-dimensional projective space and points of a quadric
in a five-dimensional projective space. The last paper shows
that the Dirac equation bears a certain relation to Kummer’s
surface, viz., the structure of the Dirac ring of matrices is
related to that of Kummer’s 166 configuration . . . ."
[4]
O. Veblen
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA , 19 (1933), p. 503
Full Text via CrossRef
E.M. Bruins
Proc. Nederl. Akad. Wetensch. , 52 (1949), p. 1135
F.C. Taylor Jr., Master thesis, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill (1968), unpublished
A remark of my own on the structure of Kummer’s 166 configuration . . . .
See as well yesterday morning's post.
The Dream of the Expanded Field continues…
From Klein's 1893 Lectures on Mathematics —
"The varieties introduced by Wirtinger may be called Kummer varieties…."
— E. Spanier, 1956
From this journal on March 10, 2013 —
From a recent paper on Kummer varieties,
arXiv:1208.1229v3 [math.AG] 12 Jun 2013,
"The Universal Kummer Threefold," by
Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam, Gus Schrader, and Bernd Sturmfels —
Two such considerations —
Update of 10 PM ET March 7, 2014 —
The following slides by one of the "Kummer Threefold" authors give
some background related to the above 64-point vector space and
to the Weyl group of type E7, W (E7):
The Cayley reference is to "Algorithm for the characteristics of the
triple ϑ-functions," Journal für die Reine und Angewandte
Mathematik 87 (1879): 165-169. <http://eudml.org/doc/148412>.
To read this in the context of Cayley's other work, see pp. 441-445
of Volume 10 of his Collected Mathematical Papers .
Denote the d-dimensional hypercube by
"… after coloring the sixty-four vertices of
alternately red and blue, we can say that
the sixteen pairs of opposite red vertices represent
the sixteen nodes of Kummer's surface, while
the sixteen pairs of opposite blue vertices
represent the sixteen tropes."
— From "Kummer's 166 ," section 12 of Coxeter's 1950
"Self-dual Configurations and Regular Graphs"
Just as the 4×4 square represents the 4-dimensional
hypercube
so the 4x4x4 cube represents the 6-dimensional
hypercube
For religious interpretations, see
Nanavira Thera (Indian) and
I Ching geometry (Chinese).
See also two professors in The New York Times
discussing images of the sacred in an op-ed piece
dated Sept. 26 (Yom Kippur).
The Importance of Being Ernst —
In the above Wikipedia revision today, the anonymous user “Redactedentity”
found that the article Kummer surface omitted Kummer’s first name
and so changed “authorlink=Ernst Kummer|last=Kummer” to
“authorlink=Ernst Kummer|last=Ernst Kummer.” This fixed the
omission but makes no sense as a statement of parameters.
“Redactedentity” was apparently unable to read the following page,
which explains that “last=” is for the author’s last name —
Of course, this revision may be merely an instance of trolling or of
the sort of humor sometimes found among people with the following
interests:
See also Pazouzou.
The “bricks” in posts tagged Octad Group suggest some remarks
from last year’s HBO “Watchmen” series —
Related material — The two bricks constituting a 4×4 array, and . . .
“(this is the famous Kummer abstract configuration )”
— Igor Dolgachev, ArXiv, 16 October 2019.
As is this —
.
The phrase “octad group” does not, as one might reasonably
suppose, refer to symmetries of an octad (a “brick”), but
instead to symmetries of the above 4×4 array.
A related Broomsday event for the Church of Synchronology —
“In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….”
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
City of God , by E. L. Doctorow
Related material — Schoolgirls and Six-Set Geometry.
Underlying Structure of the Design —
Schoolgirl Problem —
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/
ntuc-learninghub-ceo-kwek-kok-kwong-dies-aged-53
“Mountain, not fountain.” — Nabokov
The above Vanity Fair article was republished on the Web by VF
on September 3, 2013. See also this journal on that date.
Related religious remarks —
* “Bulk apperception” is a phrase from Westworld. See Log24 notes.
For an account by R. T. Curtis of how he discovered the Miracle Octad Generator,
see slides by Curtis, “Graphs and Groups,” from his talk on July 5, 2018, at the
Pilsen conference on algebraic graph theory, “Symmetry vs. Regularity: The first
50 years since Weisfeiler-Leman stabilization” (WL2018).
See also “Notes to Robert Curtis’s presentation at WL2018,” by R. T. Curtis.
Meanwhile, here on July 5, 2018 —
| Simultaneous perspective does not look upon language as a path because it is not the search for meaning that orients it. Poetry does not attempt to discover what there is at the end of the road; it conceives of the text as a series of transparent strata within which the various parts—the different verbal and semantic currents—produce momentary configurations as they intertwine or break apart, as they reflect each other or efface each other. Poetry contemplates itself, fuses with itself, and obliterates itself in the crystallizations of language. Apparitions, metamorphoses, volatilizations, precipitations of presences. These configurations are crystallized time: although they are perpetually in motion, they always point to the same hour—the hour of change. Each one of them contains all the others, each one is inside the others: change is only the oft-repeated and ever-different metaphor of identity.
— Paz, Octavio. The Monkey Grammarian |
The 2018 Log24 post containing the above Paz quote goes on to quote
remarks by Lévi-Strauss. Paz’s phrase “series of transparent strata”
suggests a review of other remarks by Lévi-Strauss in the 2016 post
“Key to All Mythologies.“
“Continue to exercise caution with stories that can only be
corroborated by dead guys. Fabricated stories are almost
never made up out of whole cloth, but are made by stitching
together generally known facts with bits of uncheckable fantasy.”
— Intelligence officer Frank Anderson, who reportedly
died on January 27, 2020.
This journal on that date —
Or: Plato's Cave.
See also this journal on November 9, 2003 …
A post on Wittgenstein's "counting pattern" —
The 15 2-subsets of a 6-set correspond to the 15 points of PG(3,2).
(Cullinane, 1986*)
The 35 3-subsets of a 7-set correspond to the 35 lines of PG(3,2).
(Conwell, 1910)
The 56 3-subsets of an 8-set correspond to the 56 spreads of PG(3,2).
(Seidel, 1970)
Each correspondence above may have been investigated earlier than
indicated by the above dates , which are the earliest I know of.
See also Correspondences in this journal.
* The above 1986 construction of PG(3,2) from a 6-set also appeared
in the work of other authors in 1994 and 2002 . . .
Addendum at 5:09 PM suggested by an obituary today for Stephen Joyce:
See as well the word correspondences in
“James Joyce and the Hermetic Tradition,” by William York Tindall
(Journal of the History of Ideas , Jan. 1954).
The van Dam cited by Polster should not be confused
with the fictional Vandamm of "North by Northwest."
See Pursued by a Biplane (Log24, May 23, 2017).
* For the title, see posts tagged March 8, 2018.
"A great many other properties of E-operators
have been found, which I have not space
to examine in detail."
— Sir Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science ,
Cambridge University Press, 1935, page 271.
The following 4×4 space, from a post of Aug. 30, 2015,
may help:
The next time she visits an observatory, Emma Stone
may like to do a little dance to …
James R. Flynn (born in 1934), "is famous for his discovery of
the Flynn effect, the continued year-after-year increase of IQ
scores in all parts of the world." —Wikipedia
His son Eugene Victor Flynn is a mathematician, co-author
of the following chapter on the Kummer surface—
Note that in the pictures below of the 15 two-subsets of a six-set,
the symbols 1 through 6 in Hudson's square array of 1905 occupy the
same positions as the anticommuting Dirac matrices in Arfken's 1985
square array. Similarly occupying these positions are the skew lines
within a generalized quadrangle (a line complex) inside PG(3,2).
Related narrative — The "Quantum Tesseract Theorem."
|
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Tetrahedral Structures
|
Playing with shapes related to some 1906 work of Whitehead:
"This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of
equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of
transformations S mediating between them."
— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups,
Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16
From "Six Significant Landscapes," by Wallace Stevens (1916) —
VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses —
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon —
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
But see "cones, waving lines, ellipses" in Kummer's Quartic Surface
(by R. W. H. T. Hudson, Cambridge University Press, 1905) and their
intimate connection with the geometry of the 4×4 square.
A revision of the above diagram showing
the Galois-addition-table structure —
Related tables from August 10 —
See "Schoolgirl Space Revisited."
"This outer automorphism can be regarded as
the seed from which grow about half of the
sporadic simple groups…." — Noam Elkies
Closely related material —
The top two cells of the Curtis "heavy brick" are also
the key to the diamond-theorem correlation.
The previous post, "Dream of Plenitude," suggests . . .
"So here's to you, Nordstrom-Robinson . . . ."
Some related material in this journal — See a search for k6.gif.
Some related material from Harvard —
Elkies's "15 simple transpositions" clearly correspond to the 15 edges of
the complete graph K6 and to the 15 2-subsets of a 6-set.
For the connection to PG(3,2), see Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
The following "manifestation" of the 2-subsets of a 6-set might serve as
the desired Wikipedia citation —
See also the above 1986 construction of PG(3,2) from a 6-set
in the work of other authors in 1994 and 2002 . . .
"The purpose of mathematics cannot be derived from an activity
inferior to it but from a higher sphere of human activity, namely,
religion."
— Igor Shafarevitch, 1973 remark published as above in 1982.
"Perhaps."
— Steven H. Cullinane, February 13, 2019
|
From Log24 on Good Friday, April 18, 2003 — . . . What, indeed, is truth? I doubt that the best answer can be learned from either the Communist sympathizers of MIT or the “Red Mass” leftists of Georgetown. For a better starting point than either of these institutions, see my note of April 6, 2001, Wag the Dogma. See, too, In Principio Erat Verbum , which notes that “numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom.” Since today is the anniversary of the death of MIT mathematics professor Gian-Carlo Rota, an example of “sun in forest gloom” seems the best answer to Pilate’s question on this holy day. See
“Examples are the stained glass windows Motto of Plato’s Academy † The Exorcist, 1973 |
Detail from an image linked to in the above footnote —
"And the darkness comprehended it not."
Id est :
A Good Friday, 2003, article by
a student of Shafarevitch —
"… there are 25 planes in W . . . . Of course,
replacing {a,b,c} by the complementary set
does not change the plane. . . ."
Of course.
See. however, Six-Set Geometry in this journal.
This journal on the above date, October 17, 2008 —
“Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality,
something which will hold up for a long time, and
I guess we did it with ‘Stairway.'”
— Jimmy Page on “Stairway to Heaven“
Scholium —
"Kummer " in German means "sorrow."
Related material —
Other posts now tagged Dolmen.
The above cryptic search result indicates that there may
soon be a new Norwegian art installation based on this page
of Eddington (via Log24) —
See also other posts tagged Kummerhenge.
References in recent posts to physical space and
to mathematical space suggest a comparison.
Physical space is well known, at least in the world
of mass entertainment.
Mathematical space, such as the 12-dimensional
finite space of the Golay code, is less well known.
A figure from each space —
The source of the Conway-Sloane brick —
Quote from a mathematics writer —
“Looking carefully at Golay’s code is like staring into the sun.”
The former practice yields reflections like those of Conway and Sloane.
The latter practice is not recommended.
Some images, and a definition, suggested by my remarks here last night
on Apollo and Ross Douthat's remarks today on "The Return of Paganism" —
In finite geometry and combinatorics,
an inscape is a 4×4 array of square figures,
each figure picturing a subset of the overall 4×4 array:
Related material — the phrase
"Quantum Tesseract Theorem" and …
A. An image from the recent
film "A Wrinkle in Time" —
B. A quote from the 1962 book —
"There's something phoney
in the whole setup, Meg thought.
There is definitely something rotten
in the state of Camazotz."
(Continued from this morning)
"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."
— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets
See also other Log24 posts tagged Kummerhenge.
A search this morning for articles mentioning the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis within the last year yielded an abstract for two talks given
at Hiroshima on March 8 and 9, 2018 —
| http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/ branched/files/2018/abstract/Aitchison.txt Iain AITCHISON Title: Construction of highly symmetric Riemann surfaces, related manifolds, and some exceptional objects, I, II Abstract: Since antiquity, some mathematical objects have played a special role, underpinning new mathematics as understanding deepened. Perhaps archetypal are the Platonic polyhedra, subsequently related to Platonic idealism, and the contentious notion of existence of mathematical reality independent of human consciousness. Exceptional or unique objects are often associated with symmetry – manifest or hidden. In topology and geometry, we have natural base points for the moduli spaces of closed genus 2 and 3 surfaces (arising from the 2-fold branched cover of the sphere over the 6 vertices of the octahedron, and Klein’s quartic curve, respectively), and Bring’s genus 4 curve arises in Klein’s description of the solution of polynomial equations of degree greater than 4, as well as in the construction of the Horrocks-Mumford bundle. Poincare’s homology 3-sphere, and Kummer’s surface in real dimension 4 also play special roles. In other areas: we have the exceptional Lie algebras such as E8; the sporadic finite simple groups; the division algebras: Golay’s binary and ternary codes; the Steiner triple systems S(5,6,12) and S(5,8,24); the Leech lattice; the outer automorphisms of the symmetric group S6; the triality map in dimension 8; and so on. We also note such as: the 27 lines on a cubic, the 28 bitangents of a quartic curve, the 120 tritangents of a sextic curve, and so on, related to Galois’ exceptional finite groups PSL2(p) (for p= 5,7,11), and various other so-called `Arnol’d Trinities’. Motivated originally by the `Eightfold Way’ sculpture at MSRI in Berkeley, we discuss inter-relationships between a selection of these objects, illustrating connections arising via highly symmetric Riemann surface patterns. These are constructed starting with a labeled polygon and an involution on its label set. Necessarily, in two lectures, we will neither delve deeply into, nor describe in full, contexts within which exceptional objects arise. We will, however, give sufficient definition and detail to illustrate essential inter-connectedness of those exceptional objects considered. Our starting point will be simplistic, arising from ancient Greek ideas underlying atomism, and Plato’s concepts of space. There will be some overlap with a previous talk on this material, but we will illustrate with some different examples, and from a different philosophical perspective. Some new results arising from this work will also be given, such as an alternative graphic-illustrated MOG (Miracle Octad Generator) for the Steiner system S(5,8,24), and an alternative to Singerman – Jones’ genus 70 Riemann surface previously proposed as a completion of an Arnol’d Trinity. Our alternative candidate also completes a Trinity whose two other elements are Thurston’s highly symmetric 6- and 8-component links, the latter related by Thurston to Klein’s quartic curve. |
See also yesterday morning’s post, “Character.”
Update: For a followup, see the next Log24 post.
"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."
— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets
Note also the four 4×4 arrays surrounding the central diamond
in the chi of the chi-rho page of the Book of Kells —
From a Log24 post
of March 17, 2012
"Interlocking, interlacing, interweaving"
— Condensed version of page 141 in Eddington's
1939 Philosophy of Physical Science
From "The Trials of Device" (April 24, 2017) —
See also Wittgenstein in a search for "Ein Kampf " in this journal.
"The novel has a parallel narrative that eventually
converges with the main story."
— Wikipedia on a book by Foer's novelist brother
Public Squares
An image from the online New York Times
on the date, July 6,
of the above Atlantic article —
An image from "Blackboard Jungle," 1955 —
"Through the unknown, remembered gate . . . ."
"… Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."
— T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," 1936
"Read something that means something."
— Advertising slogan for The New Yorker
The previous post quoted some mystic meditations of Octavio Paz
from 1974. I prefer some less mystic remarks of Eddington from
1938 (the Tanner Lectures) published by Cambridge U. Press in 1939 —
"… we have sixteen elements with which to form a group-structure" —
See as well posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.
A passage that may or may not have influenced Madeleine L’Engle’s
writings about the tesseract :
| From Mere Christianity , by C. S. Lewis (1952) —
“Book IV – Beyond Personality: I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to follow rather carefully. You know that in space you can move in three ways—to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say, a cube—a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares. Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels. Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already. You may ask, “If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the good of talking about Him?” Well, there isn’t any good talking about Him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time —tonight, if you like. . . . . |
But beware of being drawn into the personal life of the Happy Family .
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24966339 —
“The colorful story of this undertaking begins with a bang.”
And ends with …
“Galois was a thoroughly obnoxious nerd,
suffering from what today would be called
a ‘personality disorder.’ His anger was
paranoid and unremitting.”
A clue to the relationship between the Kummer (16, 6)
configuration and the large Mathieu group M24 —
Related material —
See too the diamond-theorem correlation.
Backstory for fiction fans, from Log24 on June 11 —
Related non -fiction —
See as well the structure discussed in today's previous post.
From Nanavira Thera, "Early Letters," in Seeking the Path —
"nine possibilities arising quite naturally" —
Compare and contrast with Hudson's parametrization of the
4×4 square by means of 0 and the 15 2-subsets of a 6-set —
"… lo lidchok et haketz …."
— Acceptance speech, Guardian of Zion award, 2002
Also on February 20, 2012 —
A Buddhist view —
“Just fancy a scale model of Being
made out of string and cardboard.”
— Nanavira Thera, 1 October 1957,
on a model of Kummer’s Quartic Surface
mentioned by Eddington
A Christian view —
A formal view —
From a Log24 search for High Concept:
See also Galois Tesseract.
"Just fancy a scale model of Being
made out of string and cardboard."
— Nanavira Thera, 1 October 1957,
on a model of Kummer's Quartic Surface
mentioned by Eddington
"… a treatise on Kummer's quartic surface."
The "super-mathematician" Eddington did not see fit to mention
the title or the author of the treatise he discussed.
See Hudson + Kummer in this journal.
See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.
From an obituary for Stanley Cavell, Harvard philosopher
who reportedly died at 91 on Tuesday, June 19:
The London Review of Books weblog yesterday —
"Michael Wood reviewed [Cavell’s]
Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow in 2005:
'The ordinary slips away from us. If we ignore it, we lose it.
If we look at it closely, it becomes extraordinary, the way
words or names become strange if we keep staring at them.
The very notion turns into a baffling riddle.' "
See also, in this journal, Tuesday morning's Ici vient M. Jordan and
this morning's previous post.
Update of 3:24 AM from my RSS feed —
"But perhaps the desire for story
is what gets us into trouble to begin with."
— Sarah Marshall on June 5, 2018
"Beckett wrote that Joyce believed fervently in
the significance of chance events and of
random connections. ‘To Joyce reality was a paradigm,
an illustration of a possibly unstateable rule…
According to this rule, reality, no matter how much
we try to manipulate it, can only shift about
in continual movement, yet movement
limited in its possibilities…’ giving rise to
‘the notion of the world where unexpected simultaneities
are the rule.’ In other words, a coincidence … is actually
just part of a continually moving pattern, like a kaleidoscope.
Or Joyce likes to put it, a ‘collideorscape’."
— Gabrielle Carey, "Breaking Up with James Joyce,"
Sydney Review of Books , 15 June 2018
Carey's carelessness with quotations suggests a look at another
author's quoting of Ellmann on Joyce —
The title was suggested by the name "ARTI" of an artificial
intelligence in the new film 2036: Origin Unknown.
The Eye of ARTI —
See also a post of May 19, "Uh-Oh" —
— and a post of June 6, "Geometry for Goyim" —
Mystery box merchandise from the 2011 J. J. Abrams film Super 8
An arty fact I prefer, suggested by the triangular computer-eye forms above —
This is from the July 29, 2012, post The Galois Tesseract.
See as well . . .
This post was suggested by the names* (if not the very abstruse
concepts ) in the Aug. 20, 2013, preprint "A Panoramic Overview
of Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory," by S. Mochizuki.
* Specifically, Jacobi and Kummer (along with theta functions).
I do not know of any direct connection between these names'
relevance to the writings of Mochizuki and their relevance
(via Hudson, 1905) to my own much more elementary studies of
the geometry of the 4×4 square.
The above four-element sets of black subsquares of a 4×4 square array
are 15 of the 60 Göpel tetrads , and 20 of the 80 Rosenhain tetrads , defined
by R. W. H. T. Hudson in his 1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface .
Hudson did not view these 35 tetrads as planes through the origin in a finite
affine 4-space (or, equivalently, as lines in the corresponding finite projective
3-space).
In order to view them in this way, one can view the tetrads as derived,
via the 15 two-element subsets of a six-element set, from the 16 elements
of the binary Galois affine space pictured above at top left.
This space is formed by taking symmetric-difference (Galois binary)
sums of the 15 two-element subsets, and identifying any resulting four-
element (or, summing three disjoint two-element subsets, six-element)
subsets with their complements. This process was described in my note
"The 2-subsets of a 6-set are the points of a PG(3,2)" of May 26, 1986.
The space was later described in the following —
*The Hudson of the title is the author of Kummer's Quartic Surface (1905).
The Rosenhain of the title is the author for whom Hudson's 4×4 diagrams
of "Rosenhain tetrads" are named. For the "complexity to simplicity" of
the title, see Roger Fry in the previous post.
(Continued … See the title in this journal, as well as Cube Bricks.)
Cube Bricks 1984 —
Related material —
Dirac and Geometry in this journal,
Kummer’s Quartic Surface in this journal,
Nanavira Thera in this journal, and
The Razor’s Edge and Nanavira Thera.
See as well Bill Murray’s 1984 film “The Razor’s Edge” …
Movie poster from 1984 —
“A thin line separates
love from hate,
success from failure,
life from death.”
Three other dualities, from Nanavira Thera in 1959 —
“I find that there are, in every situation,
three independent dualities….”
(Click to enlarge.)
The previous post discussed the parametrization of
the 4×4 array as a vector 4-space over the 2-element
Galois field GF(2).
The 4×4 array may also be parametrized by the symbol
0 along with the fifteen 2-subsets of a 6-set, as in Hudson's
1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface —
Hudson in 1905:
These two ways of parametrizing the 4×4 array — as a finite space
and as an array of 2-element sets — were related to one another
by Cullinane in 1986 in describing, in connection with the Curtis
"Miracle Octad Generator," what turned out to be 15 of Hudson's
1905 "Göpel tetrads":
A recap by Cullinane in 2013:
Click images for further details.
The authors Taormina and Wendland in the previous post
discussed some mathematics they apparently did not know was
related to a classic 1905 book by R. W. H. T. Hudson, Kummer's
Quartic Surface .
"This famous book is a prototype for the possibility
of explaining and exploring a many-faceted topic of
research, without focussing on general definitions,
formal techniques, or even fancy machinery. In this
regard, the book still stands as a highly recommendable,
unparalleled introduction to Kummer surfaces, as a
permanent source of inspiration and, last but not least,
as an everlasting symbol of mathematical culture."
— Werner Kleinert, Mathematical Reviews ,
as quoted at Amazon.com
Some 4×4 diagrams from that book are highly relevant to the
discussion by Taormina and Wendland of the 4×4 squares within
the 1974 Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis that were later,
in 1987, described by Curtis as pictures of the vector 4-space over
the two-element Galois field GF(2).
Hudson did not think of his 4×4 diagrams as illustrating a vector space,
but he did use them to picture certain subsets of the 16 cells in each
diagram that he called Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads .
Some related work of my own (click images for related posts)—
Rosenhain tetrads as 20 of the 35 projective lines in PG(3,2)
Göpel tetrads as 15 of the 35 projective lines in PG(3,2)
Related terminology describing the Göpel tetrads above
Some background for my post of Nov. 20,
"Anticommuting Dirac Matrices as Skew Lines" —
His earlier paper that Bruins refers to, "Line Geometry
and Quantum Mechanics," is available in a free PDF.
For a biography of Bruins translated by Google, click here.
For some additional historical background going back to
Eddington, see Gary W. Gibbons, "The Kummer
Configuration and the Geometry of Majorana Spinors,"
pages 39-52 in Oziewicz et al., eds., Spinors, Twistors,
Clifford Algebras, and Quantum Deformations:
Proceedings of the Second Max Born Symposium held
near Wrocław, Poland, September 1992 . (Springer, 2012,
originally published by Kluwer in 1993.)
For more-recent remarks on quantum geometry, see a
paper by Saniga cited in today's update to my Nov. 20 post.
Some context for yesterday's post on a symplectic polarity —
This 1986 note may or may not have inspired some remarks
of Wolf Barth in his foreword to the 1990 reissue of Hudson's
1905 Kummer's Quartic Surface .
See also the diamond-theorem correlation.
The title of the previous post, "Slow Art," is a phrase
of the late art critic Robert Hughes.
Example from mathematics:
Click the Barth passage to see it with its surrounding text.
Related material:
"Those that can be obtained…." —
Related music video: Waterloo.
* "In defense of the epistemic view of quantum states:
a toy theory," by Robert W. Spekkens, Perimeter Institute
for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Canada
Mathematical
Literary (also from May 18, 2010)
(Continued from Mystery Box, Feb. 4, and Mystery Box II, Feb. 5.)
The Box
Inside the Box
Outside the Box
For the connection of the inside notation to the outside geometry,
see Desargues via Galois.
(For a related connection to curves and surfaces in the outside
geometry, see Hudson's classic Kummer's Quartic Surface and
Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).)
"… a list of group theoretic invariants
and their geometric incarnation…"
— David Lehavi on the Kummer 166 configuration in 2007
Related material —
"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."
— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets
"This is not theology; this is mathematics."
— Steven H. Cullinane on four quartets
To wit:
The Kummer 166 configuration is the configuration of sixteen
6-sets within a 4×4 square array of points in which each 6-set
is determined by one of the 16 points of the array and
consists of the 3 other points in that point's row and the
3 other points in that point's column.
See Configurations and Squares.
The Wikipedia article Kummer surface uses a rather poetic
phrase* to describe the relationship of the 166 to a number
of other mathematical concepts — "geometric incarnation."
Related material from finitegeometry.org —
* Apparently from David Lehavi on March 18, 2007, at Citizendium .
Mathematics:
A review of posts from earlier this month —
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
|
Narrative:
Aooo.
Happy birthday to Stephen King.
(Continued from yesterday)
The foreword by Wolf Barth in the 1990 Cambridge U. Press
reissue of Hudson's 1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface
covers some of the material in yesterday's post Moonshine.
The distinction that Barth described in 1990 was also described, and illustrated,
in my 1986 note "Picturing the smallest projective 3-space." The affine 4-space
over the the finite Galois field GF(2) that Barth describes was earlier described—
within a 4×4 array like that pictured by Hudson in 1905— in a 1979 American
Mathematical Society abstract, "Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring."
"The distinction between Rosenhain and Goepel tetrads
is nothing but the distinction between isotropic and
non-isotropic planes in this affine space over the finite field."
The 1990 paragraph of Barth quoted above may be viewed as a summary
of these facts, and also of my March 17, 2013, note "Rosenhain and Göpel
Tetrads in PG(3,2)."
The following excerpt from a January 20, 2013, preprint shows that
a Galois-geometry version of the large Desargues 154203 configuration,
although based on the nineteenth-century work of Galois* and of Fano,**
may at times have twenty-first-century applications.
Atkinson's paper does not use the square model of PG(3,2), which later
in 2013 provided a natural view of the large Desargues 154203 configuration.
See my own Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry. Atkinson's
"subset of 20 lines" corresponds to 20 of the 80 Rosenhain tetrads
mentioned in that later article and pictured within 4×4 squares in Hudson's
1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface.
* E. Galois, definition of finite fields in "Sur la Théorie des Nombres,"
Bulletin des Sciences Mathématiques de M. Férussac,
Vol. 13, 1830, pp. 428-435.
** G. Fano, definition of PG(3,2) in "Sui Postulati Fondamentali…,"
Giornale di Matematiche, Vol. 30, 1892, pp. 106-132.
Desargues' theorem according to a standard textbook:
"If two triangles are perspective from a point
they are perspective from a line."
The converse, from the same book:
"If two triangles are perspective from a line
they are perspective from a point."
Desargues' theorem according to Wikipedia
combines the above statements:
"Two triangles are in perspective axially [i.e., from a line]
if and only if they are in perspective centrally [i.e., from a point]."
A figure often used to illustrate the theorem,
the Desargues configuration , has 10 points and 10 lines,
with 3 points on each line and 3 lines on each point.
A discussion of the "if and only if" version of the theorem
in light of Galois geometry requires a larger configuration—
15 points and 20 lines, with 3 points on each line
and 4 lines on each point.
This large Desargues configuration involves a third triangle,
needed for the proof (though not the statement ) of the
"if and only if" version of the theorem. Labeled simply
"Desargues' Theorem," the large configuration is the
frontispiece to Volume I (Foundations) of Baker's 6-volume
Principles of Geometry .
Point-line incidence in this larger configuration is,
as noted in a post of April 1, 2013, described concisely
by 20 Rosenhain tetrads (defined in 1905 by
R. W. H. T. Hudson in Kummer's Quartic Surface ).
The third triangle, within the larger configuration,
is pictured below.
Background: Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2)
|
Introduction: The Large Desargues Configuration Added by Steven H. Cullinane on Friday, April 19, 2013 Desargues' theorem according to a standard textbook:
"If two triangles are perspective from a point The converse, from the same book:
"If two triangles are perspective from a line
Desargues' theorem according to Wikipedia
"Two triangles are in perspective axially [i.e., from a line]
A figure often used to illustrate the theorem,
A discussion of the "if and only if" version of the theorem
This large Desargues configuration involves a third triangle,
Point-line incidence in this larger configuration is,
The third triangle, within the larger configuration,
|
A connection discovered today (April 1, 2013)—
(Click to enlarge the image below.)
Update of April 18, 2013
Note that Baker's Desargues-theorem figure has three triangles,
ABC, A'B'C', A"B"C", instead of the two triangles that occur in
the statement of the theorem. The third triangle appears in the
course of proving, not just stating, the theorem (or, more precisely,
its converse). See, for instance, a note on a standard textbook for
further details.
(End of April 18, 2013 update.)
Update of April 14, 2013
See Baker's Proof (Edited for the Web) for a detailed explanation
of the above picture of Baker's Desargues-theorem frontispiece.
(End of April 14, 2013 update.)
Update of April 12, 2013
A different figure, from a site at National Tsing Hua University,
shows the three triangles of Baker's figure more clearly:
(End of update of April 12, 2013)
Update of April 13, 2013
Another in a series of figures illustrating
Desargues's theorem in light of Galois geometry:
See also the original Veblen-Young figure in context.
(End of update of April 13, 2013)
Rota's remarks, while perhaps not completely accurate, provide some context
for the above Desargues-Rosenhain connection. For some other context,
see the interplay in this journal between classical and finite geometry, i.e.
between Euclid and Galois.
For the recent context of the above finite-geometry version of Baker's Vol. I
frontispiece, see Sunday evening's finite-geometry version of Baker's Vol. IV
frontispiece, featuring the Göpel, rather than the Rosenhain, tetrads.
For a 1986 illustration of Göpel and Rosenhain tetrads (though not under
those names), see Picturing the Smallest Projective 3-Space.
In summary… the following classical-geometry figures
are closely related to the Galois geometry PG(3,2):
|
Volume I of Baker's Principles has a cover closely related to the Rosenhain tetrads in PG(3,2) |
Volume IV of Baker's Principles has a cover closely related to the Göpel tetrads in PG(3,2) |
|
Foundations (click to enlarge)
|
Higher Geometry (click to enlarge)
|
"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience."
"Greet guests with a touch of glass."
In Like Flynn
From the Wall Street Journal site Friday evening—
| ESSAY September 21, 2012, 9:10 p.m. ET
Are We Really Getting Smarter? Americans’ IQ scores have risen steadily over the past century.
|
No, thank you. I prefer the ninth configuration as is—
Why? See Josefine Lyche’s art installation “Grids, you say?“
Her reference there to “High White Noon” is perhaps
related to the use of that phrase in this journal.
The phrase is from a 2010 novel by Don DeLillo.
See “Point Omega,” as well as Lyche’s “Omega Point,”
in this journal.
The Wall Street Journal author above, James R. Flynn (born in 1934),
“is famous for his discovery of the Flynn effect, the continued
year-after-year increase of IQ scores in all parts of the world.”
—Wikipedia
His son Eugene Victor Flynn is a mathematician, co-author
of the following chapter on the Kummer surface—
For use of the Kummer surface in Buddhist metaphysics, see last night’s
post “Occupy Space (continued)” and the letters of Nanavira Thera from the
late 1950s at nanavira.blogspot.com.
These letters, together with Lyche’s use of the phrase “high white noon,”
suggest a further quotation—
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn’t get much higher
See also the Kummer surface at the web page Configurations and Squares.
"The word 'space' has, as you suggest, a large number of different meanings."
— Nanavira Thera in [Early Letters. 136] 10.xii.1958
From that same letter (links added to relevant Wikipedia articles)—
|
Space (ākāsa) is undoubtedly used in the Suttas
Your second letter seems to suggest that the space |
A simpler metaphysical system along the same lines—
|
The theory, he had explained, was that the persona
— The Gameplayers of Zan , |
"I am glad you have discovered that the situation is comical:
ever since studying Kummer I have been, with some difficulty,
refraining from making that remark."
— Nanavira Thera, [Early Letters, 131] 17.vii.1958
"Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized."
— Wallace Stevens, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome"
The following edifice may be lacking in grandeur,
and its properties as a configuration were known long
before I stumbled across a description of it… still…
"What we do may be small, but it has
a certain character of permanence…."
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
The Kummer 166 Configuration
as seen by Kantor in 1969— (pdf, 2.5 MB)
For some background, see Configurations and Squares.
For some quite different geometry of the 4×4 square that is
original with me, see a page with that title. (The geometry's
importance depends in part on its connection with the
Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R.T. Curtis. I of course
had nothing to do with the MOG's discovery, but I do claim credit
for discovering some geometric properties of the 4×4 square
that constitutes two-thirds of the MOG as originally defined .)
Related material— The Schwartz Notes of June 1.
On this date 106 years ago…
Prefatory note from Hudson's classic Kummer's Quartic Surface ,
Cambridge University Press, 1905—
RONALD WILLIAM HENRY TURNBULL HUDSON would have
been twenty-nine years old in July of this year; educated at
St Paul's School, London, and at St John's College, Cambridge,
he obtained the highest honours in the public examinations of the
University, in 1898, 1899, 1900; was elected a Fellow of St John's
College in 1900; became a Lecturer in Mathematics at University
College, Liverpool, in 1902; was D.Sc. in the University of London
in 1903; and died, as the result of a fall while climbing in Wales,
in the early autumn of 1904….
A many-sided theory such as that of this volume is
generally to be won only by the work of many lives;
one who held so firmly the faith that the time is well spent
could ill be spared.
— H. F. Baker, 27 March 1905
For some more recent remarks related to the theory, see
Defining Configurations and its updates, March 20-27, 2011.
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences has an article titled "Number of combinatorial configurations of type (n_3)," by N.J.A. Sloane and D. Glynn.
From that article:
The following corrects the word "unique" in the example.
* This post corrects an earlier post, also numbered 14660 and dated 7 PM March 18, 2011, that was in error.
The correction was made at about 11:50 AM on March 20, 2011.
_____________________________________________________________
Update of March 21
The problem here is of course with the definition. Sloane and Glynn failed to include in their definition a condition that is common in other definitions of configurations, even abstract or purely "combinatorial" configurations. See, for instance, Configurations of Points and Lines , by Branko Grunbaum (American Mathematical Society, 2009), p. 17—
In the most general sense we shall consider combinatorial (or abstract) configurations; we shall use the term set-configurations as well. In this setting "points" are interpreted as any symbols (usually letters or integers), and "lines" are families of such symbols; "incidence" means that a "point" is an element of a "line". It follows that combinatorial configurations are special kinds of general incidence structures. Occasionally, in order to simplify and clarify the language, for "points" we shall use the term marks, and for "lines" we shall use blocks. The main property of geometric configurations that is preserved in the generalization to set-configurations (and that characterizes such configurations) is that two marks are incident with at most one block, and two blocks with at most one mark.
Whether or not omitting this "at most one" condition from the definition is aesthetically the best choice, it dramatically changes the number of configurations in the resulting theory, as the above (8_3) examples show.
Update of March 22 (itself updated on March 25)
For further background on configurations, see Dolgachev—
Note that the two examples Dolgachev mentions here, with 16 points and 9 points, are not unrelated to the geometry of 4×4 and 3×3 square arrays. For the Kummer and related 16-point configurations, see section 10.3, "The Three Biplanes of Order 4," in Burkard Polster's A Geometrical Picture Book (Springer, 1998). See also the 4×4 array described by Gordon Royle in an undated web page and in 1980 by Assmus and Sardi. For the Hesse configuration, see (for instance) the passage from Coxeter quoted in Quaternions in an Affine Galois Plane.
Update of March 27
See the above link to the (16,6) 4×4 array and the (16,6) exercises using this array in R.D. Carmichael's classic Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order (1937), pp. 42-43. For a connection of this sort of 4×4 geometry to the geometry of the diamond theorem, read "The 2-subsets of a 6-set are the points of a PG(3,2)" (a note from 1986) in light of R.W.H.T. Hudson's 1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface , pages 8-9, 16-17, 44-45, 76-77, 78-79, and 80.
Kernel of Eternity
Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)”
— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)
“… donc Dieu existe, réponse!”
— attributed, some say falsely, to Leonhard Euler
For Hermann Weyl's Birthday:
A Structure-Endowed Entity
"A guiding principle in modern mathematics is this lesson: Whenever you have to do with a structure-endowed entity S, try to determine its group of automorphisms, the group of those element-wise transformations which leave all structural relations undisturbed. You can expect to gain a deep insight into the constitution of S in this way."
— Hermann Weyl in Symmetry
Exercise: Apply Weyl's lesson to the following "structure-endowed entity."
What is the order of the resulting group of automorphisms? (The answer will, of course, depend on which aspects of the array's structure you choose to examine. It could be in the hundreds, or in the hundreds of thousands.)
Reciprocity
From my entry of Sept. 1, 2003:
"…the principle of taking and giving, of learning and teaching, of listening and storytelling, in a word: of reciprocity….
… E. M. Forster famously advised his readers, 'Only connect.' 'Reciprocity' would be Michael Kruger's succinct philosophy, with all that the word implies."
— William Boyd, review of Himmelfarb, New York Times Book Review, October 30, 1994
Last year's entry on this date:
|
Today's birthday:
"Mathematics is the music of reason."
Sylvester, a nineteenth-century mathematician, coined the phrase "synthematic totals" to describe some structures based on 6-element sets that R. T. Curtis has called "rather unwieldy objects." See Curtis's abstract, Symmetric Generation of Finite Groups, John Baez's essay, Some Thoughts on the Number 6, and my website, Diamond Theory. |
The picture above is of the complete graph
Diamond theory describes how the 15 two-element subsets of a six-element set (represented by edges in the picture above) may be arranged as 15 of the 16 parts of a 4×4 array, and how such an array relates to group-theoretic concepts, including Sylvester's synthematic totals as they relate to constructions of the Mathieu group M24.
If diamond theory illustrates any general philosophical principle, it is probably the interplay of opposites…. "Reciprocity" in the sense of Lao Tzu. See
Reciprocity and Reversal in Lao Tzu.
For a sense of "reciprocity" more closely related to Michael Kruger's alleged philosophy, see the Confucian concept of Shu (Analects 15:23 or 24) described in
Kruger's novel is in part about a Jew: the quintessential Jewish symbol, the star of David, embedded in the
Click on the design for details.
Those who prefer a Jewish approach to physics can find the star of David, in the form of
A Graphical Representation
of the Dirac Algebra.
The star of David also appears, if only as a heuristic arrangement, in a note that shows generating partitions of the affine group on 64 points arranged in two opposing triplets.
Having thus, as the New York Times advises, paid tribute to a Jewish symbol, we may note, in closing, a much more sophisticated and subtle concept of reciprocity due to Euler, Legendre, and Gauss. See
Sacerdotal Jargon
From the website
Abstracts and Preprints in Clifford Algebra [1996, Oct 8]:
Paper: clf-alg/good9601
From: David M. Goodmanson
Address: 2725 68th Avenue S.E., Mercer Island, Washington 98040
Title: A graphical representation of the Dirac Algebra
Abstract: The elements of the Dirac algebra are represented by sixteen 4×4 gamma matrices, each pair of which either commute or anticommute. This paper demonstrates a correspondence between the gamma matrices and the complete graph on six points, a correspondence that provides a visual picture of the structure of the Dirac algebra. The graph shows all commutation and anticommutation relations, and can be used to illustrate the structure of subalgebras and equivalence classes and the effect of similarity transformations….
Published: Am. J. Phys. 64, 870-880 (1996)
The following is a picture of K6, the complete graph on six points. It may be used to illustrate various concepts in finite geometry as well as the properties of Dirac matrices described above.
From
"The Relations between Poetry and Painting,"
by Wallace Stevens:
"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color. . . . The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."
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